"Well, I'll tell ye how I know. I told ye there was no hurry."
If he was long now in speaking, Caius did not know it. Upon his brain crowded thoughts and imaginations: wild plans for saving the woman he loved; wild, unholy desires of revenge; and a wild vision of misery in the background as yet—a foreboding that the end might be submission to the worst pains of impotent despair.
O'Shea had taken out a piece of paper, but did not open it.
"'Tain't an hour back I got this. The skipper of the schooner and me know each other. He's been bound over by me to let me know if that man ever set foot in his ship to come to this place, and he's managed to get a lad off his ship in the noight, and across the ice, and he brought me this. Le Maître, he's drunk, lyin' in his bunk; that's the way he's preparing to come ashore. It may be one day, it may be two, afore the schooner can get in. Le Maître he won't get off it till it's in th' harbour. I guess that's about all there is to tell." O'Shea added this with grim abstinence from fiercer comment.
"Does she know?" Caius' throat hardly gave voice to the words.
"No, she don't; and I don't know who is to tell her. I can't. I can do most things." He looked up round the walls and ceiling, as if hunting in his mind for other things he could not do. "I'll not do that. 'Tain't in my line. My wife is adown on her knees, mixing up prayers and crying at a great rate; and says I to her, 'You've been a-praying about this some years back; I'd loike to know what good it's done. Get up and tell madame the news;' and says she that she couldn't, and she says that in the morning you're to tell her." O'Shea set his face in grim defiance of any sentiment of pity for Caius that might have suggested itself.
Caius said nothing; but in a minute, grasping at the one straw of hope which he saw, "What are you going to do?" he asked.
O'Shea smoothed out the letter he held.
"Well, you needn't speak so quick; it's just that there I thought we might have our considerations upon. I'm not above asking advoice of a gintleman of the world like yerself; I'm not above giving advoice, neither."
He sat looking vacantly before him with a grim smile upon his face. Caius saw that his mind was made up.